What Can Gendered Address Forms in Chinese Social Media Tell Us about Contemporary Chinese Cultural Ethos and Mechanisms of Linguistic Innovation? A Semantic Inquiry

The rapidly expanding use of social media on Chinese-language platforms has generated innovative forms of language. New words, expressions and structures have gained instant popularity; and many commonly used words and expressions have been drawn upon to express new meanings. What new meanings have been created?  How and why have they emerged? What conditions the selection of some linguistic forms, but not others, to express them?  The answers to these and many other questions can reveal a great deal about the mechanisms behind linguistic innovation and ways of thinking, feeling and social interaction. But answering these questions requires a sharp tool that is capable of incisive meaning analysis. In this talk, I will focus on a selection of emergent gender-specific address forms developed by social media users, as a way to explore the contemporary cultural ethos of the young generation in mainland China and the mechanisms of linguistic innovation, particularly in the age of digital media. My main objective is to conduct detailed semantic analyses of the terms in question and reveal their hidden meanings. In so doing, I demonstrate that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach (e.g. Goddard et al. 2023; Ye 2019) is a valuable heuristic tool which enables a deep understanding of the social conditions under which language change takes place and the interplay between language and society. 

References

Goddard, Cliff, Anna Wierzbicka and Zhengdao Ye (2023). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. In Fuyin Thomas Li (ed.), Handbook of Cognitive Semantics (Vol.1), pp. 99-137. Leiden: Brill.

Ye, Zhengdao (2019). The emergence of expressible agency and irony in today’s China: A semantic explanation of the new bèi-construction. Australian Journal of Linguistics 39 (1): 57-78.